One day my lovely friend who DJs at KFJC discovered my site and asked if I wanted to be on the radio with her. SURE! I said. So I went, we talked, we had a blast and here’s the transcript:

Rocket J. Squirrel: This is Chantrelle we’re talking to. Hi! So, I got all excited about your website, FoodPorn.com, especially the titles of your different sections.

Chantrelle: Aren’t I clever?

Rocket J. Squirrel: Very clever… you had to do some research on the terminology I imagine.

Chantrelle: Yeah, don’t check my website cache.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Oh, (laughs) don’t look behind the Green door! So, talk to me about what food porn is.

Chantrelle: It is an incredible love of food.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Love? Biblically?

Chantrelle: Um, if you prefer… but it’s safe for work. It’s recipes, restaurant reviews…The restaurant reviews are under table dance, the recipes are under self pleasuring, the T-shirts and such are under toys. There’s also amateur, asian, and celebrities — that’s an important one.

Rocket J. Squirrel: You’ve interviewed quite a few.

Chantrelle: I have, I’d love to interview more. My first interview was Neil Gaiman, which is how [you and I] met.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Did he talk about sushi?

Chantrelle: Well of course, we went out to sushi!

Rocket J. Squirrel: I think that’s all he talks about when it’s about food. I mean, he might have been on the macrobiotic thing when you talked to him but…

Chantrelle: No.

Rocket J. Squirrel: That’s not something you really want him to discuss, you want him to talk about sushi.

Chantrelle: Yeah, that was pretty much the impetus of the lunch. He pretty much said, “Sure you can interview me, we’ll go to sushi.”

Rocket J. Squirrel: Where did you guys go?

Chantrelle: We went to Yoshi’s because he was in the East Bay for something and it was a lunch gig. It was hard to find a place open for lunch that was easy to get into on short notice and I think it was fourth of July weekend too… years ago. But it was fun, he had eggplant sushi which he got because he was in the Bay Area and wouldn’t find it elsewhere. It was great.

Recently I interviewed Alan Anton from the Cowboy Junkies who is also a big foodie. And Mark Van Name, the sci-fi writer, we just went to the French Laundry last weekend.

Rocket J. Squirrel: How was the French laundry? I’ve heard incredible…

Chantrelle: You have to ask?

Rocket J. Squirrel: Isn’t it the one with the Michelin five stars or something?

Chantrelle: Three stars

Rocket J. Squirrel: Only three?

Chantrelle: You can only get three!

Rocket J. Squirrel: I know I know. I think it goes to 11, at least I’ve heard… I haven’t been there yet.

Chantrelle: It was my second time there. I went in 2003…

Rocket J. Squirrel: It was a spring day… you can probably remember every detail can’t you?

Chantrelle: I can, I can. But we’d heard that Thomas Keller was spreading themselves too thin, opening too many restaurants, it had gone downhill, they raised their prices. They did raise their prices, but the quality did not diminish. It was a phenomenal, fantastic, wonderful five hour meal. I think I say in the write up online that they can’t call it a review, because you can’t review the French Laundry, you just go there and you’re in awe. I toured the… well I didn’t tour the kitchen, they stuck me in a corner so I could watch.

Rocket J. Squirrel: So it was like, Dear diary: today I went to the French laundry, oh my god I’m in love!! I’m so in love of going to marry it!

Chantrelle: Pretty much! I stood in the corner of the kitchen in awe. It was quiet, they don’t speak above regular conversational tones. Everything looked perfect, everything was gleaming white. It’s like being inside the inner sanctum of the food Vatican. It was amazing and I didn’t want to leave, but I felt in the way… and I had to go eat!

Rocket J. Squirrel: You didn’t tell them you’d do dishes?

Chantrelle: No, I’d probably break something!

Rocket J. Squirrel: That’s a good way of getting out of doing the dishes. Wow, that’s really cool. So give me the names of three people you’d like to interview next. And if you all are listening in, and I hope you are…

Chantrelle: My ultimate interview, which is the one that I pretty much set up the celebrities section for is Tori Amos. She’s humored me and said I could get the interview but I haven’t gotten one yet. Amanda Palmer, which should happen, sometime, hopefully.

Rocket J. Squirrel: They’re both satellites of the same guy.

Chantrelle: They are… and so is Jonathan Coulton which should happen as well. I always feel like I’m poaching all of Neil Gaiman’s friends.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Chabon is in there too. You should get Chabon.

Chantrelle: That’s a good idea.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Is that how you say it… “sha-bow”. I’m going to stick with “Sha-bow” since we talked about the French Laundry.

Chantrelle:I don’t speak any French whatsoever so…

Rocket J. Squirrel: Oh, pardon. You don’t have to speak French, you just have to have ze
fantastic accent.

Chantrelle: I’m not good at that either!

Rocket J. Squirrel: If you have ze outrageous accent zay don’t care what you say.

Chantrelle: I’m not good at accents either except for a Okie because I grew up in a hick town.

Rocket J. Squirrel: That must be why you like real food. You’re done with the cornpone.

Chantrelle: Exactly, although my mom is listening and still lives there so I can’t talk too badly about it.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Oh no, no…We’re talking about regional mom. And we’re holding her hostage because she can go eat lunch until her darlin’ has talked about the food porn enough and we’re not done yet.

Okay, so that was the celebrity part. Tell me… what’s your favorite thing for breakfast?

Chantrelle: Frittata, I make it every weekend. The recipe’s on FoodPorn under self-pleasuring!

Rocket J. Squirrel: There you go.

Chantrelle: Frittata with potatoes and a good crusty French bread.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Where’s your favorite place to go out for breakfast or brunch?

Chantrelle: Oh, it closed. In Santa Cruz it closed…well, it didn’t close fully, it just closed for breakfast.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Which?

Chantrelle: Ristorante Avanti used to serve the most amazing breakfast. They don’t do it anymore. So I don’t go out for breakfast in Santa Cruz anymore. That’s why make frittatas, because Avanti made frittatas so I had to replace it.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Do they still have Pergolesi?

Chantrelle: Yeah.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Is it still good?

Chantrelle: I don’t know. I don’t go there anymore. I haven’t been there since college. I used to be there all the time in college.

Rocket J. Squirrel: I love that place. The cutest, cutest waiter in the world worked there with long curly brown hair. He was absolutely gorgeous. And then of course my best friend in Santa Cruz snapped him up. I didn’t even have to ask her which one. She said, “Oh, I’m dating a waiter. You might’ve seen him at Pergolesi.” I said, “I know who you’ve got.”

Chantrelle: I used to spend many, many hours there during college, writing and writing and writing and writing.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Oh, the chocolate cake…truffle cake… Now I see why you call it food porn. It’s all making sense to me now.

Chantrelle: It’s true. It just happens with good food.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Where is your favorite cheeseburger?

Chantrelle: I don’t like cheeseburgers. Sorry!

Rocket J. Squirrel: I can tell you where mine is.

Chantrelle: OK

Rocket J. Squirrel: It’s on Valencia. And it’s called… what’s it called?… something “bun”… I’ll go look it up because it’s that good. I’ll go look it up in a minute. It’s gotten rave reviews. It literally was the best meat I’ve ever had and I’m a prime rib freak. This was probably the best burger because it was the best beef I’ve ever had…ever. It was so cool because the cook happened to be the owner and he opened up the restaurant because he didn’t like the meat people were serving. He’s like, “I really wanted really fresh, really juicy meat.” Ohhh… Now I’m starting to get the food porn thing again.

Chantrelle: I understand! Oh, breakfast in San Francisco…I like Zazie… or however you say it, “zah-zee.” It’s probably French.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Oh, pardon…no, no, not pardon…[insert french stuff here]

Chantrelle: You can say whatever you want, I’m not going to know what you’re saying.

Rocket J. Squirrel: I just said, “Your mom is listening.” [laughing]

Chantrelle: But Zazie has this really good orange cinnamon French toast. It’s to die for.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Oh yeah, I just swooned. Okay, keep going. Tell me about your other favorites. Just talk about your website because it’s such a cool concept. FoodPorn.com by the way.

Chantrelle: Well, it just had its 10th anniversary. So I started out when not many people were using the term food porn and when I asked people for interviews they would assume it was something dirty and wouldn’t want to talk to me.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Like a Splosh thing? We thought we invented splosh but apparently splosh has been around a while too.

Chantrelle: There used to be a FoodPorn.net, it has since folded… that was not my site.

Rocket J. Squirrel: It was like American Pie?

Chantrelle: Yeah. I’d have to give that sort of disclaimer every time I gave the URL. It’s gone now so it’s safer…. as far as I know it’s gone. So one day, 10 years ago, some housemates and I were standing around eating tremendous food. Someone commented on how it was food porn with all the moaning going on with every bite. My husband disappeared into the attic, where our computers were at the time, came back down and said, “Somehow it was available and now it’s ours.” And we had FoodPorn.com! We just brainstormed from there and came up with the categories. We used to have Barely Legal which is the homebrew section. I just switched it to Barley Legal because that came up the other day and how clever that was with the beer.

It’s just sort of grown over the years without a whole lot of effort. I come up with new ideas every once in awhile but most of the time I just put up what I eat and what I make and take pictures of things. It used to be weird to take a camera into a restaurant but now I notice that almost every table has them. People are taking food pictures everywhere now. I used to have to ask if it was okay if I took pictures of the food, but now it seems almost expected. I think that’s the Food Network’s influence on the world.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Who’s your favorite Food Network chefs?

Chantrelle:I can’t even watch that channel anymore. It’s so soap-opera-y and not about the food anymore. But I do love Alton Brown.

Rocket J. Squirrel: There you go, Alton Brown. In England they have… what’s her name… she’s absolutely dahling.

Chantrelle: Nigella Lawson?

Rocket J. Squirrel: Nigella! She’s great!

Chantrelle: I do like her. I have a hard time watching the Food Network now though because it’s not over the top good food anymore.

Rocket J. Squirrel: I never really watched it but I cruised through one show. It was a contest for cake making or decorating. And the subject was Dr. Seuss. And I sat there glued for 30 minutes while I watched these people pull cats out of their hats and Horton hearing whos. They were in 3-D. They were, some of them, 5 feet tall. Some of them took eight people to move.

Chantrelle: Did some of them end up falling over before the competition was over?

Rocket J. Squirrel: I heard that, I didn’t see it actually happen but I heard a lot of people talking about that. It was like Project Runway which is the only reality show I’ve ever been able to stomach.

Chantrelle: I watch Top Chef which is becoming, same thing, more about the soap opera and less about the food. But I still get inspired. I still want my husband to come home some night and surprise me with some Quickfire challenge. Just like, “I got you these things, make something in 20 minutes.”

Rocket J. Squirrel: Isn’t that Iron Chef?

Chantrelle: That’s different. That’s where they have a specific ingredient. In the Quickfire Challenge they tell them they have to make something for breakfast in 20 minutes or whatever.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Neil introduced me to Iron Chef. He had them all recorded. In Japanese.

Chantrelle: The subtitled ones, right. Before it was on the Food Network… before it became a food football game.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Apparently we get all of art bad taste from England and Japan. It probably wasn’t bad taste until we got a hold of it though.

Chantrelle: We used to have Iron Chef nights at our house. We’d watch the subtitled ones, they were great. There were the ones with, we didn’t make up this term but, vegetarian conversion moments: VCM’s. I think the top-rated one was the octopus episode when they took a live octopus and butchered it to make stuff out of it. It made me never want to eat octopus again.

Rocket J. Squirrel: I can’t eat them because they’re smarter than me.

Chantrelle: They are smart! I can’t eat them anymore. I still eat squid. I still get my cephalopods.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Squid are stupid. I love cephalopods. It’s like eating sea snails… Give it to me it’s great. I’m going to interrupt for this little story… the red octopus at the Monterey Bay aquarium. You have to go down there and yes, you have to see to sea otters but then you have to go see her being fed. She does the most erotic food porn dance.

Chantrelle: She’s beautiful.

Rocket J. Squirrel: It’s food porn for her because she’s going to get fed right? And so she’s just undulating for the longest period of time. But my friend used to work at the Steinhart aquarium in San Francisco. She was working there so she was in lab conditions. There is this room where they had all these tanks with different kinds of fish and every night there’d be fish missing. Different kinds of fish.

Chantrelle: I heard this story!

Rocket J. Squirrel: I love this story and it’s totally true. They put cameras on the room to see what happened, they just never got a picture of anything coming into the room stealing fish. Well, somebody sat there all night till they watched the octopus come up out of its tank, push the lid aside, come up over the tank and move along the different tanks until it sampled which sushi it wanted, it went into the tank, ate its fill, put the lid back on that food tank… let’s call it its buffet… then it went back into its own tank and pulled the lid back over it. It’s just brilliant.

Chantrelle: Maybe heard that story from you.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Probably!

Chantrelle: I’ve retold the story since but I couldn’t remember the source.

Rocket J. Squirrel: You should, it’s a true story! But they had had the cameras on the door, that was the trick. So it was like, how could they miss that?

Chantrelle: I think that’s the story that made me stop eating octopus. I think it was from you!

Rocket J. Squirrel: It’s the story that made me… well I never actually ate octopus. But that’s why I never have eaten it.

Chantrelle: I did, it would come on the chef’s platter sushi plate thing. It wasn’t anything I ever really loved but it was there so I’d eat it.

Rocket J. Squirrel: It’s easy for me, I’m allergic to fish. I can eat crustaceans though.

Chantrelle: At least you’ve got something!

Rocket J. Squirrel: I can eat the expensive stuff: crab, lobster, scallops.

Chantrelle: Oh, the lobster dish at the French Laundry was amaaaazzzzing!

Rocket J. Squirrel: Who paid for this by the way?

Chantrelle: We kind of split it up, divided it up. The first time I went I’d gotten a gift certificate from my old boss who lives near here actually. It was a bonus for building a website for him. This time it was supplemented by friends.

Rocket J. Squirrel: That’s very cool. Did they go with you?

Chantrelle: Oh yeah, they were there.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Okay, they didn’t just send you to the French laundry with money.

Chantrelle: They subsidized my meal.

Rocket J. Squirrel: That’s very cool. I need some sort of incentive to go… not an incentive, there’s enough incentive, some kind of reason.

Chantrelle: You need someone to give you a gift certificate!

Rocket J. Squirrel: Not necessarily, I need a really good reason because I’m not going to go by myself. It has to be instigated around something.

Chantrelle: You can go with me!

Rocket J. Squirrel: I’ll go with you, there you go.

Chantrelle: We’ve got to go back. We kept talking about how we were holding ourselves back from licking the plates…

Rocket J. Squirrel: Why?

Chantrelle: After the fact we were like, “Why did we not lick the plates?!” so were going to go back…

Rocket J. Squirrel: Are you a stickler for silverware too?

Chantrelle: No, I’m not! It’s just so… when you’re in there… I don’t like the pomp and circumstance and the first thing I try to do is break down the waitstaff so they don’t do the pomp and circumstance. I crack jokes with them and all those sorts of things so they know they don’t have to be all uptight with us. I would love the good food in a subway station. I don’t need all the white multiple stacked plates and unveiling the food at the same time. When you’re surrounded by all of that stuffiness it starts to rub off a little bit and we felt like it would be a little weird to pick up the plate and lick it. And then regretted it after the fact. So next time I go, forget it, I’m lickin’ the plate. I don’t care.

Rocket J. Squirrel: I was still trying to find that burger place. It’s so good! You can’t just go out there and tell it’s the best cheeseburger ever… I went on a worldwide and about decade-long search for the best tiramisu in the world. Well, in this part of the universe…it was crazy.

Chantrelle: So, what did you find?

Rocket J. Squirrel: Should I tell?

Chantrelle: Of course!

Rocket J. Squirrel: Okay, so this is the thing,I was in North Beach… there’s actually several places, including a friend, that makes tiramisu in my book, because I have a very specific thing I want it to taste like. I don’t like it runny and I don’t like it like cheesecake because that’s why you would go buy cheesecake if you want cheesecake.

Chantrelle: Exactly.

Rocket J. Squirrel: There’s this perfect thing, it has to have a lot of whipped cream. It’s got to be held gelatinously, non-oozy, by whipped cream as well. It’s hard to explain. One of my friends makes it, of course she’s buggered off to Austin, so she’s not making it for me regularly anymore. I’m walking around North Beach and everyone’s like, “Oh the tiramisu…” I went to one place and it was eh. I went to another place and it was really bad. I went to another place and it was really, really good. I’m feeling like Goldilocks at this point right? I’m dragging all my friends with me, this all happened over a couple of weeks. Some of the same friends came with me and they were like, “Oh God, here she goes, she’s going to drag us through all the tiramisu.” We’re walking up Columbus, past Broadway and there’s some little deli on the left-hand side…

Chantrelle: You’re doing it again… you’re not knowing the name!

Rocket J. Squirrel: No no no, everyone will know it, it’s a famous place… everyone knows the name of the deli. The deli, the one that comes to a point on the end of the block. I can’t remember the name of it because that’s the only time I’ve ever been in it. So I walk in and I say, “I’m here to taste your tiramisu.” And the guy behind the counter says, “I just sold the last piece.” The woman in front of me had brought the last piece. And I was like, “Oh bummer, as I’m on this worldwide search for tiramisu…” And he says, “Oh, here” and he hands me a spoon with which he’s been serving an entire huge industrial size pan tiramisu out of. And the spoon was about the size, covered with what was about two pieces of their tiramisu. I just sat there and looked the spoon for a minute and then it was…ugh…food porn! It was kind of an orgy of tiramisu. That was the best tiramisu, bar none, that I’ve ever had.

Chantrelle: Have you had it as a full piece? Or was part of the love the act of licking it off the spoon?

Rocket J. Squirrel: There were so many chunks of it… no, it was huge. The spoon was pretty big… you all just need to push your ears closer to the speaker and you can see what I’m doing… so, there are chunks and chunks of it so it was definitely a solid piece… oh god it was good! The licking of the spoon wasn’t bad either.

Chantrelle: There is the Thomas Keller theory… well not his theory… but the law of diminishing return theory that he’s got with his food where if you have two or three bites of something it leaves you wanting more but if you get this enormous plate of it you get full and sick of it and it’s not something you want to come back to. So it’s that leaving you wanting more idea.

Rocket J. Squirrel: He’s not talking about lasagna, clearly. Oh, or macaroni and cheese… even Kraft…I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I love it, it’s comfort food.

Chantrelle: It’s okay, it’s a lot of people’s comfort food. I don’t like cheese! Isn’t that horrible?

Rocket J. Squirrel: That is such a weird thing for foodie.

Chantrelle:I’m a huge foodie and I don’t like cheese, olives, or bell peppers. So I can never go to Greece.

Rocket J. Squirrel: I can never go to Japan because of the fish. And I don’t like rice.

Chantrelle: Yeah, that would be another problem.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Yeah that would suck. But wait, the cheese thing… Are you talking about all cheese?

Chantrelle: All cheese. I hate it.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Whoa!

Chantrelle: It’s rotten milk.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Okkaaayyyyy. Do you like milk?

Chantrelle: I like milk. I don’t like milk that’s gone bad.

Rocket J. Squirrel: You don’t like sour cream?

Chantrelle: I don’t like sour cream.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Do you like buttermilk?

Chantrelle: I like buttermilk waffles.I make my mom’s excellent buttermilk waffles!

Rocket J. Squirrel: Hi mom! I hear you make excellent buttermilk waffles!

Chantrelle: But yeah, any sort of milk product that’s no longer milk. I like whipped cream, don’t like sour cream.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Oh, I love whipped cream…I just stopped drinking coffee but I love whipped cream, it’s just harder to put it on something. My fingers!

Chantrelle: I drink coffee once every couple of weeks. My husband roasts his own coffee beans. So he’ll make me a mocha with Recchiuiti hot chocolate as the base and a shot of freshly roasted coffee bean espresso… it’s good.

Rocket J. Squirrel: That just woke me up.

Chantrelle: That’s all you need!

Rocket J. Squirrel: That’s pretty damn good. So, anything else? There’s probably tons of things you want to put out there?

Chantrelle: Oh…probably. But, no, not off the tip of my tongue.

Rocket J. Squirrel: I can keep going…What’s your favorite dessert?

Chantrelle: At Ristorante Avanti, the place that doesn’t serve breakfast anymore, they still serve dinner and they’ve got this Pot de Creme which is…

Rocket J. Squirrel: “poh” de creme

Chantrelle: Yes, thank you. It’s thicker than mousse so it’s not fluffy, air-filled… dense chocolate and covered with whipped cream. But not sweetened whipped cream, I don’t even know if the whipped cream has any sugar in it.

Rocket J. Squirrel: It shouldn’t. Maybe a little bit of vanilla.

Chantrelle: Vanilla…yep. It’s fantastic. And that came to mind because I just had it night before last.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Is it served in ceramic or crust?

Chantrelle: It’s just a little blob in a cup.It’s great!

Rocket J. Squirrel: Next time I want you to bring me a blob in a cup.

Chantrelle: A lot of times I get it to-go because I can’t finish it at the restaurant because it’s so rich, I need a long period of time to eat it. So I sit there all night with it and watch Dexter or something.

Rocket J. squirrel: I learned this week that watching Dexter while eating is sometimes not a good idea.

Chantrelle: It’s really not. We’re one episode behind though so we can’t say anything.

Rocket J. Squirrel: I’m about two or three episodes behind… I don’t know. I save them and then I just go cram them. Watch them all. My favorite thing to do with the season of whatever…

Chantrelle: We do that. We were three episodes behind, now we’re just one.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Californication, still my favorite.

Chantrelle: I’m a whole season behind a that one. But, yes, desserts! Anything from Recchiuti chocolate.

Rocket J. Squirrel: What is Recchiuti chocolate?

Chantrelle: Recchiuti’s in the ferry building. In the ferry building there’s two chocolate places: Scharffenerger and Recchiuti. Scharffenberger does confections but they do more of the bar chocolate. Recchiuti does more of the confections. Little tiny pieces of amazing little chocolates.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Have you tried Tcho?

Chantrelle: No.

Rocket J. Squirrel: T-c-h-o. It’s also the Embarcadero and friends of mine started it. Oddly enough, tech, SRL, Burning Man, they started this up out of the blue and it’s really good chocolate. It’s amazing good chocolate.

Chantrelle: We were at whiskey-fest a few weeks ago and there was a random chocolatier there, Pico Dolce [correction: Poco Dolce]. They did a lot of toffee stuff which Recchiuti doesn’t do, they sort of filled a void. There was an espresso one, and a salt one, one that had a cayenne thing going on. There was some serious heat in that one.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Yeah, they like the pepper and chocolate these days. It’s a new fad. I guess it’s not new anymore.

Chantrelle: There was the salt and chocolate, then the cayenne and Mexican spice chocolate.

Rocket J. Squirrel: I guess it comes from mole so it’s come north across the border. The first time I ever had, whatever it was, I think it was jalapenos and chocolate, somebody brought me chocolate chip cookies from New Mexico. And I was like, oh yeah, and you’re eating them and everything’s fine then you realize you keep tasting all these very complex flavors afterwards. It was just layers and layers of heat and then chocolate. It was really good. Then I found out afterwards that everyone’s doing that.

Chantrelle: Not all trends are bad.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Lavender and chocolate, bleh. Bergamot in chocolate? No.

Chantrelle: Oh, I like bergamot and chocolate.

Rocket J. Squirrel: You can keep it. I can’t handle anything peppermint in chocolate. No fruit and chocolate or peppermint in chocolate.

Chantrelle: I don’t like fruit in chocolate either. Peppermint…

Rocket J. Squirrel: Nuts and chocolate are good.

Chantrelle: Peppermint I’m okay with but the ratio has to be right. York peppermint patties I think are great but Newman’s peppermint patties…

Rocket J. squirrel: What about After Eights?

Chantrelle: Those are okay. But they’re milk chocolate right? I like dark chocolate.

Rocket J. Squirrel: I love that people think that white chocolate is chocolate… it’s not chocolate.

Chantrelle: No, no, no, not white chocolate. It’s not cocoa, it’s fat. Recchiuti actually had really good… we went on a tour thing there, or a little day of nibbling things. He talked about white chocolate and how most of the white chocolate in this country has been bleached And they’ve taken all the flavor out. They have to make it white because real white chocolate is sort of gray. And it actually has flavor.

Rocket J. Squirrel: They cover that in Switzerland by putting nuts in it. So the gray you think is just the nuts.

Chantrelle: He made me realize that white chocolate isn’t a bad thing when it’s pure and good and from a really good chocolatier.When they haven’t added all this horrible stuff in it to make a pretty.

Rocket J. Squirrel: I overdosed on it in Switzerland. I actually went into OD mode. They bought us these huge Toblerones that are, like, bigger than your head. Never eat anything bigger than your head. That’s what I learned. I can’t even smell it anymore without going, “Oh God I remember the overdose.”

Chantrelle: I like 68% dark chocolate.

Rocket J. Squirrel: That is the perfect one. I agree. 68-70%.

Chantrelle: It’s just sweet enough, just bitter enough.

Rocket J. Squirrel: This is lovely. I have been turned on to and by food porn. So, FoodPorn.com and you’re Chantrelle.

Chantrelle: I am.

Rocket J. Squirrel: Thanks for hanging out.

Chantrelle: Thanks for having me.

Rocket J. Squirrel: She’s a friend of mine and she wanted to come hang out. I was thinking, I don’t know anything about food porn and I just saw your site for the first time yesterday. I thought, “Oh god, this is hysterical!” So yeah, check it out.

Chantrelle: Now I’m starving for lunch.

Rocket J. Squirrel: I know, and your mom, her stomach is probably growling!